The Great Santini
“They dressed in silence on opposite sides of their bedroom. Lillian was in a slip at her dressing table carefully applying her makeup. Bull reflected on whether dress whites that had been tailored for a one-hundred-ninety-pound man would permit the entry of the same man who now weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. They both dressed as if they did not know the other was in the room.This was the night that always filled Bull Meecham with a deep pride in the Corps. It was a night of confirmation... when he felt an almost mystical affinity with every man who had ever borne the motto of semper fidelis. All over the world, on this one night, he knew, every Marine, active or retired, in groups of thousands, in small clusters, or single sentries patrolling unfriendly borders, all of them, to the last man, turned to this night in celebration and pride. On this night, they drank to the birth of the Corps. For Bull, this night released a sad cargo of memory that held the names and faces of pilots he had seen flaming toward a violent death in Pacific waters, all the dead Marines he had known, the old faces smiling in motionless portraits frozen by recall: they came to him now, the lost squadrons of brash, cocky pilots culled from the sky by a world that thrived on the blood of young men.MoreLess
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